Empower 180 provides comprehensive, faith-forward support to justice-involved individuals, with a focused commitment to Indigenous women, as they journey through reentry and into healthy, thriving lives.
Empower 180 envisions a future where justice-involved women, especially Indigenous women, experience healing, restoration, and the opportunity to build strong foundations for healthy, thriving lives. We see communities strengthened as women rise into stability, leadership, and generational impact.
When women have the right support in the first weeks and months after release, recidivism goes down. With practical resources, trauma-informed tools, and consistent culture and faith-based mentorship, women can come home, stay home, and build stable, healthy lives that strengthen families and communities for generations.
Rosebud Madinger is a nonprofit leader with more than a decade of experience working alongside women impacted by incarceration. She has volunteered within the Montana Women’s Prison for approximately ten years, facilitating groups and mentoring women in preparation for reentry. She has extensive experience as a speaker and facilitator, addressing topics such as trauma, suicide prevention, cultural identity, and spiritual growth. She has spoken for churches, conferences, schools, and community events throughout the Northwest.
She is also the Co-Founder of Life Source Church, established in 2015, where she currently serves as Executive Pastor, providing organizational leadership, curriculum development, mentorship, and community outreach. In addition, Rosebud served as both a curriculum writer and facilitator for the Culture and Drugs Don’t Mix initiative funded through SAMHSA, and has provided leadership and mentorship with One Heart Warriors, a discipleship-based Native leadership training program.
Rosebud’s background includes formal training in Native Youth Suicide Prevention and Trauma Care, along with ministerial training. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Rocky Mountain College. She is an enrolled member of the Fort Peck Sioux Tribe and is also of Northern Cheyenne descent, bringing lived cultural knowledge and community connection to her work. She currently serves on the board of Arise Native American Ministries and lives in Billings, Montana, with her husband Abe and their four children.
Empower 180 was born out of relationship, persistence, and a growing awareness that something more was needed.
Over ten years ago, I had a dear friend named Diane Jobe. Diane had spent 21 years of her life battling addiction, and by the time I met her, she had been clean and sober for over two decades. She carried a deep passion for prison ministry and volunteered faithfully inside the women’s prison. For a long time, she urged me to come with her.
“Rosebud,” she would say, “so many of the women are Native American. It would mean so much to them to hear from a Native woman.”
Eventually, I said yes—and more than ten years later, I am still going in.
Over that decade of volunteering, I began to see a pattern that was impossible to ignore. Women who were motivated. Women who were trying. Women who had hope. And yet, too many of them were returning to prison despite their best efforts to succeed on the outside. The desire to change was there—but the support, resources, and stability often were not.
There is a strange and sobering moment that happens when you have volunteered in the prison long enough. You walk in one month and see a familiar face. At first, there is happiness—like seeing someone you haven’t seen in a while. Then the realization hits: they are back. The happiness gives way to sadness, sometimes anger, and deep grief. And yet, mixed into all of it, there is relief. Relief that they are alive.
Breaking free from an old life is incredibly difficult—especially when no real alternative life is available to step into.
In 2024, a group of individuals working throughout Montana’s prison and reentry systems came together under the leadership of the Gianforte Foundation to ask a critical question: How can we better fill the gaps in reentry—particularly for Native women, who are vastly overrepresented in the system?
After months of collaboration, listening, and problem-solving, I applied for a grant through the Gianforte Foundation to begin offering reentry services specifically designed for Native women. The grant was awarded, and in January of 2025, Empower 180 officially began the work of helping women build healthy, thriving lives they love.
